1. Make Your Content Personal

Social media is all about being personal. This seems so obvious that you often neglect it the most.

Just think about it. How many times have you been too formal or too salesy? You got to sell, of course. I’m all for selling. But you have to make your fan base feel connected and you need to provide value first.

Most of the content people post on social media is personal. Everything from “I’m here hanging with my friends” to “I just watched the worst movie ever”. It’s the nature of how we connect and share with each other on social.

So why should your content be any different?

You have to make your fan base feel connected.

Just how personal you get with your content depends on your business. Even so, give your content a human touch. Be careful, though, being personal with your content doesn’t mean you share what you had for breakfast or how cute is that puppy. Think about added value to your audience.

And always write in a conversational tone. Imagine how you would speak if a fan was sitting right in front of you.

What also works is humor. How many times has a funny meme made your day?

I’m not suggesting you fill your stream with memes and funny images. I do, however, think that when you get people feeling good, they tend to engage more.

Putting people in the center of the post is another way to humanize your content. Turns out people like looking at other people. If it’s your personal brand, it will be mostly you in the images. If it’s your company, spotlight your employees.

2. Include Clever Visuals

Think. How you use social media? Do you stop and read every post? I bet you don’t. Nobody does. People skim through, they don’t read.

So when do you stop to read? When something appealing comes up. And that most likely includes a visual or a video. Makes sense, right?

The goal here is to attract the reader’s eye. Your image should evoke an instant response.

This image from Gary Vee definitely catches the eye.

Ideally, you should use the visual as a magnet to get people reading. I recommend you relate it to your product or service. Then you surround your visual with valuable content and drive traffic to your site.

As a side note shared links most likely won’t get as many likes (hearts), comments and shares, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get click-throughs. People simply forget to go back when they’ve already visited the target URL.

3. Add a Call-To-Action

If you want people to engage or to make a certain action, you need to be clear about it. Want them to click? Say “click”! Want them to share or tag a friend? Ask them!

Guys from Foundr magazine include a CTA on almost every image on Instagram.

A call-to-action can be anything from “click here to get these awesome tips” to “tag a friend who would benefit from these tips”.

But make sure the action you want them to perform is relevant to the content.

I also recommend you ask open-ended questions. Questions that cannot be answered with “yes” or “no”. While open-ended questions won’t bring you as many replies as a simple CTA, the ones you’ll get will be from highly engaged followers.

One way to further boost social media engagement is to run a contest. I am not a big fan of contests, but they can skyrocket the engagement.

When you run a contest, make sure you set goals and objectives for the contest itself, as well as the objectives of your brand’s cause.

4. Stay Consistent

To keep your engagement rates high, you need to stay consistent. Posts and updates need to be flowing regularly.

In a cluttered digital world where everything is just a click or two away, your fan base will not stay loyal if you don’t provide valuable content on a regular basis. Period.

Better yet, you should have a schedule. If for instance, you post your blog updates on Thursday, then you start posting them on Monday, and then on Friday, people will get confused and you will start losing them.

Of course, you got to test things out. But once you’ve found your sweet spot, you should stick to it.

An irregular schedule (or worse, not posting at all) is a great way to kill your social media engagement.

Don’t worry, nobody expects you to make super professional videos. That’s the charm of social media. Don’t get caught up in trying to make everything perfect. Awesome videos can be shot with free apps on your smartphone.

Got any questions or comments? Post them below. Also, share this blog post with a friend who needs to read these tips.

Written by Zoran Bosancic

Zoran has made it his personal mission to help every aspiring individual out there start a business he will love building.